Closing the transgender gap
When their daughter suffered abuse at work after coming out as trans, one couple decided it was time to fight for the legal and medical rights of all trans people
WORDS: ADAM DUXBURY
BERNARD AND TERRY REED
When Bernard and Terry Reed’s trans daughter started attending a gender clinic in the late 1980s, the world was a very different place for LGBT+ people.
Assigned male at birth, their daughter suffered horrible abuse in her macho work environment. She was 20 when she started going to the clinic and eventually told her mum, but by this time she’d been struggling with her identity in silence for years and was now battling torment at work, too.
“With the wisdom of hindsight, you see signs that were there but you didn’t actually read them at the time,” admits Terry. “Seeing your own child go through the kind of torture that she had was incredibly painful.”